The other morning I came downstairs to start the day and, as is my habit, poured myself a cup of coffee and took a deep sip.It was awful – sour and bitter and not at all the best part of waking up.

“Must have been sitting in the pot too long,” I thought to myself. “I should make a fresh pot.” So I did.I poured another cup and took another sip. Same thing – sour and bitter and in no way good to the last drop.I checked the can to make sure the coffee hadn’t gone rancid. Nope. I checked the water to see if maybe it was the problem. I checked the directions on the can thinking I might have gotten the proportions wrong. Nope.

Genius that I am, it only took me a little while after that to determine that the problem was me.I seem to have lost my taste for coffee.And frankly, I don’t know what to make of that.

I have been a coffee drinker since … oh, let me see … about third grade. No, I’m kidding. I think I was in high school when coffee became part of my routine. But I did learn to make coffee in third grade, in an old stove-top percolator.

Mom showed me how to fill the pot with water and load the basket with three scoops of coffee, and then put the thing on the stove with the burner on high until it started perking, and then to turn it down to low. I was amazed. I had no idea that making a drink could be so complicated.

I made a pot all by myself one morning and the folks raved about how good it was, so I appointed myself official weekend coffee maker. All went well, too, until I got the idea that if three scoops of coffee in the pot made good coffee, then six scoops would be fabulous. I still remember their reactions as I poured them steaming cups of road tar. Dad swallowed and grimaced. Mom asked me what I had done differently. I told her and shortly thereafter got my first lecture about how “More Does Not Always Mean Better.”

Now I am facing another lecture, I guess, and one I’m going to have to administer to myself, about how “What Was True Yesterday May Not Necessarily Be True Tomorrow.” Yesterday I was a coffee drinker; today I would rather have tea if it’s all the same.

Of course, this transition does not come without problems. For one thing, I sometimes need help gaining full consciousness in the morning, and tea does not have the kick-start quality that coffee does. For another, there’s something about finishing a meal with coffee that is not as satisfying to me as finishing with tea. And finally, I just bought a box of cake doughnuts specifically to dunk, and I can’t stand doughnuts dunked in tea. I think that last one may be the most troubling of all.

But that’s my life. I don’t know if this is a temporary condition or if I’m off coffee forever. I only know that right now, a cup of joe tastes to me pretty much like I expect my six-scoop coffee tasted to the folks. And now, if you’ll excuse me, my tea is ready.

One of the benefits of getting older – or, as I prefer to think of it, getting a few miles on your personal odometer – is that you don’t have to worry much about being hip. Breaking a hip, maybe, but not being hip.I’ve lately had occasion to observe today’s hipsters from a close distance and you know what? It seems like an awful lot of work to me – being in the right hipster places, sporting the right hipster clothes and haircut and, most importantly, showing the proper hipster attitude of bemused detachment. It looks just exhausting, carrying around such a big load of hipster responsibility.

I was in a Downtown Indianapolis hipster bar, and the place was just swarming with people doing and saying and being all the right (hip) things. Let’s talk about the guys, since I saw more of them than women (I think that’s because women aren’t as easily taken in as guys, but that’s a subject we can explore some other time.) To a man, they were all wearing the same uniform:

• Hair cut super close around the sides and left long on top. The last time I saw a haircut like this was on Humphrey Bogart in an old prison movie. As they were taking him to the electric chair.• Skinny jeans. Which in most cases were on skinny people, luckily. • Tight sports jackets that were considerably shorter than anything in my closet, hanging not quite midway down the butt of the skinny jeans. I guess it looks cool to other members of the tribe. To me it looks like someone has outgrown his clothes.• Purple shirts. And ties. There was a preponderance of purple.

And as I watched these guys milling around, drinking the right drinks and all basically trying to out-hip each other, I laughed.Not at them. OK, well, maybe at some of them. And especially at the older guys, the ones approaching my age, who were trying to fit in with the young crowd.

But mostly I was laughing at me.First, I laughed because I was having such a harrumph of a reaction to a harmless display of today’s fashion. I felt myself turning into the old man sitting on the porch yelling at the kids to stay off the lawn. Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph.

Second, I laughed because I remembered how hard I once worked to be hip and how ridiculous I must have looked in my uniform:

• Hair not cut at all but grown into a long, luxuriant mop.• Jeans with bell bottoms so big you could easily shelter a family of four in one leg.• Gaudy jackets with lapels as wide as airplane wings. Or even better, Nehru jackets.• Purple shirts. And ties. There was a preponderance of purple.

Ah, youth. A time for a young man to sow his wild oats and look ridiculous. And so it goes, from generation to generation. As the French say: Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose – loosely translated as “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The cycle goes around and it becomes someone else’s turn to be hip. Or, viewed another way, someone else’s turn to do all that work. And as an older guy I say they’re welcome to it. Harrumph.